Opcenter (Preactor) APS

Boticário develops and produces perfume and cosmetic products with over 3,200 brands in stores in Brazil, and divided between almost 900 franchises, the largest network in the world in this sector. Boticário employs almost 22,000 people.

The industrial complex located in São José dos Pinhais employs around 4,000 employees in manufacturing lines of making Creams, Makeup and Hydro. The plant’s annual turnover is R$2 billion, or R$ 5.6 billion if the stores network across the country is taken into consideration.

Initially, the production planning and capacity analysis process for the plants of creams, hydro and makeup was done by rule of thumb and with manual spreadsheets. The generation and analysis of the production plan for finished products, semi-finished components and materials was limited and very time consuming. After confirmation of the demand forecast, it took about 20 days to test and validate the production plan for a volume of thousands of SKUs.

Moreover, the planning and scheduling process had some significant limitations. The planning area had problems to evaluate the material restrictions and setup time impact on production. The short-term demand variations and unforeseen variations of production conditions during the month couldn’t be reviewed because of the planning update capabilities available to the planners.

Another problem was the lack of the whole process visibility, where due to the low level information and short time available for the manufacturing capacity analysis, this was only performed in the products filling process and did not consider the upstream manufacturing processes.

In this scenario, Boticário needed to seek a new tool to support its planning process and began a rigorous selection process to find a good supplier. The company made several evaluations of product in the market, technical visits, proof of concept projects and reference searches of the selected companies. After carefully analyzing all the alternatives, Boticário selected Preactor APS as the tool and ACCERA Supply Chain Solutions as the supplier to perform the consulting and deployment.

The main objectives were as follows:

• Balancing production with resource flexibility;
• Sequencing and prioritization for manufacturing and filling orders;
• Setups campaign optimization;
• Visibility of resources capability, tools and manpower;
• Outsourcing operation analysis;
• Speed of re-scheduling where unforeseen events occurred;

The implemented solution uses a Preactor 500 APS (Opcenter AS Ultimate) license, which carries out planning and scheduling for all the factories in integrated way, and three PREACTOR VIEWER licenses, which are used for queries and simulations. The integrated plan is produced from a single model mainly because raw materials are common to all the plants.

The production process of each one of these factories has many restrictions and specialties, so the solution uses almost all types of Preactor’s features. In the hydro manufacturing process, manufacturing tanks have different capabilities. Some products in the creams manufacturing process must be used immediately for filling after manufacture; this is accomplished using the maximum waiting between operations feature.  Other situations require clearances for microbiological analysis of the batch.  This means that they cannot continue until the study is completed.

The filling processes consider varying amounts of manpower and also special tool restrictions. Thus, the generation of the plan considers not only raw materials and machinery availability but also a series of constraints and variables that form the production system and make it richer and more realistic simulations to be performed.

The solution includes not only the Boticário internal resources but also subcontractors. Using an estimated daily capacity that can be performed by a subcontractor, the planning team can synchronize the arrival of materials and control of overhead or idle resources. Moreover, maintenance plans can be fully aligned to the production plan, being incorporated into the resources schedule to enhance the analysis and make management easier.

Marina Vieira is a Key User of Preactor at Boticário: “With the sequencing of the production plan in Preactor, materials planning has also been optimized. Now, the materials supply is equalized during the month following the orders production date. Moreover, the tool allows the analysis of a longer horizon of planning in a shorter time, supporting the decision making.“

Through custom reports, users can compare scenarios using several criteria, evaluate the usage and daily production of machines, size the manpower needs, and analyze the materials shortages and stock coverage. In this way, the company gets a plan that has been simulated and carefully analyzed by the team prior to release.

Supporting the whole process, the solution includes a full Preactor integration with the SAP ERP system through direct communication between databases. Production orders and all alternative routes are sent to Preactor, as well as information of raw materials stocks and components, purchase orders and product structures. So, in Preactor there are confirmed orders defining the route chosen and scheduled dates, returning the information to SAP. In special cases of batch splitting, an order can be eliminated prior to generation of multiple orders according to the Preactor schedule. Finally, shop floor data collection feeds Preactor to clear the orders and update the schedule.

The project was conducted by a multidisciplinary team composed by leaders of areas of IT, planning, programming, engineering and manufacturing facility. The project schedule lasted 5.5 months and although there were small delays in intermediate steps, the final delivery was made on time.

Providing a global view of the production process and factory utilization, Preactor allowed the planners to begin to have increased visibility of production capacity and operational constraints, deciding through advanced analysis which is the best scenario in accordance with the company strategic interests.
 
Bertão Everaldo is Logistics Manager at Boticário: “In using Preactor, we have achieved a quality improvement in the preparation of production plans as well as the creation of scenarios that enables better decision-making in a time of great growth in our business.“

With the new programming tool, the Boticário capacity assessments are now handled by a systemic plan that considers tool availability, manpower, machinery and materials. In addition, the intelligent sequencing setups campaigns minimizes time wasted in unnecessary changeovers.  The preventive maintenance plan has become more aligned with the planning of production capacity and is now managed in an integrated way with the production plan.

Thus, from using Preactor, Boticário now has more agility and quality in its planning process, creating a competitive advantage for its business.

And the future?  Boticário will devote more effort to using the solution for more detailed short-term scheduling.